On Thu, 27 Sep 2007, Lukas Kahwe Smith wrote:
> The crux of this (and its the case with most other OSS projects without a
> dedicated voting system) is that the "votes" are scattered throught various
> threads. There is not a proper place where people can cast (and update) their
> vote.
The poll EnterpriseDB has been running at
http://postgres.enterprisedb.com/ is up to 238 votes, with 56% for the
change to Postgres, 28% against, and 15% don't care. That's a
considerably larger sample than the number of people who have expressed an
opinion on the mailing lists, and 66% of the people who do care voting for
the change is a pretty clear majority. I did a rough count of the earlier
thread on this subject, and I recall the distribution was similar there;
my read has been that the people against the name change have just gotten
increasing vocal relative to their numbers since then. This is no
surprise as Bruce's actions have been satisfying those for the name change
while aggrevating those against.
The thought of "polling" via asking this question on the pgsql-general
list horrifies me; I'd hate to see that list hit by the denial of service
effect this one has taken addressing this issue, and I don't think that's
enough exposure either. If the community really wants to get some serious
scale polling on this subject, I'd suggest putting a poll somewhere that
people reading the 8.3 press releases would come across it.
What I started doing recently every time I'm tempted to jump into this
thread is instead take a look at
http://developer.postgresql.org/index.php/Postgres to try and figure out
how to add something useful to that rather than posting into the argument.
--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD